The art world and Switzerland are similar places. So art museums in Switzerland must be doubly so. And in fact they are.
The differences between the art world and Switzerland are: in Switzerland the rivers are very clean and you can swim in them. Other than that, in both there are a lot of display cases containing forlorn arrangements of multifarious objects, scale models and weird stock photos. In both there are a lot of middle class people, and everything is too expensive. On the point of every hour everybody gathers to take pictures with their phones.
The apotheosis of all this was at the Basel Art Museum, which at the time of Whyte Square's visit was hosting an event. In the basement everybody seemed very pleased sitting on rows of chairs. There were bowls of crackers in the next room. It was dark. On a big screen were the words 'Social Media' in a lovely contemporary font. Everyone applauded.
All of the museum buildings were beautifully designed, with very interesting textures. In the next building the lifts took us to a foyer containing a CCTV screen with changing images of all of the empty galleries. The minimalist sculptures looked very significant from this angle.
Trying to find a young fashionable project space slightly outside of the centre of Basel took Whyte Square on a small odyssey past a mad and complicated civilisation of garden gnomes. We ended up in a vibrant and multi-cultural neighbourhood. The gallery was by appointment only.
An account of a visit to some galleries in New England
As part of a business trip to North America, WS was able to undertake a few cultural visits around the Eastern seaboard. Wandering down the Bowery in New York, we avoided looking at any street art (and were perhaps 35 years too late for a spotting of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat) and instead explored the 'Keeper' exhibition at the New Museum. While encouraged by the scale and variety of the objects on display (wood carvings, paintings, photographs of teddy bears, rock samples) WS did wonder about the need for such an exhibition in what is a contemporary art gallery. Many of the exhibits were not explicitly produced with this means of display in mind – for example the snowflake photographs of Wilson Bentley. By doing so, the gallery asks what should be considered as worthy of display, and suggests any collection of visually arresting objects meet that criteria.
This is perhaps a resurrection of the dinosaur of Duchamp (here at WS we label it the Duchampasaurus, a curious beast made from sanitary ware and cleaning apparatus) and we felt that all the artefacts on display belonged more in an archaeological or zoological museum. If the intention of the exhibition was to open the mind of the New Museum visitor, we hope they will make more visits to small museums rather than contemporary galleries. That said, these visitors may become teddy-bear collectors, inspired by the large installation by Ydessa Hendeles, which perfectly captures the tedium of many large museum collections. To have one thing is of little consequence, to have twenty is perhaps interesting, but thousands of things fluctuate being being excruciating repetitive and endlessly fascinating. The viewer cannot look at each photo of a teddy bear (usually with a person or group) so the response is to consider the whole, the neatly organised frames and the glass encasing containing bears who have never had the opportunity to frighten picnicking holidaymakers in Yellowstone National Park.
The monotony of the repeated image was also something WS encountered at Dia Beacon where inside the post-industrial white rectangle are a fine range of 1960s and 1970s minimalist, conceptual and land art. The last category prompts a key problem, as putting the likes of Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria inside a 'white cube' is akin to setting zoo animals free and then later rounding them up and putting them back inside the cage. Robert Smithson is an artist who WS finds the most humorous among what can be an often dry bunch of characters. We didn't have the time to visit Passaic, New Jersey, but no doubt would prefer this to going to his Spiral Jetty, which is another of the secular shrines preserved and operated by Dia. In the basement, which seemed very suitable for a mausoleum to Messrs Smithson and de Maria, there was instead a video installation of various recordings of Bruce Naumann's studio, a further exercise in the limits of artistic tedium.
Dia Beacon is a demanding prospect for the casual visitor, who must take care not to stand on any of the threads deployed by Fred Sandback, negotiate a pile of broken glass left by Smithson, before being forced to sharpen pencils for an endless display of Sol LeWitt murals. There are few chairs for those who need to spend time contemplating Robert Ryman, Blinky Palermo and Agnes Martin, although a few church pews would no doubt conform to the Puritan aspect of this institution. WS cannot recall laughing at any of the exhibits and felt a sense of pervading earnestness through the exhibitions, even with the layers of felt from Joseph Beuys who seemed rather sad at being presented through this most austere of institutions, like a foreign exchange student who cries at night into his pillow having left Europe for the first time, with little to comfort him except the cries of coyotes on the Montana plains.
Cast off your preconceptions for a moment! Jerry Saltz’s interview of James Franco for Vulture is actually worth a read.
We may think he’s funny in Pineapple Express or a rip-off of Riff Raff in Spring Breakers, but the Art World perspective of James Franco is a pretty ubiquitous: “who the hell does this guy think he is?”
We don’t see Franco’s trajectory as parallel to our own. Despite his defense: “I’ve gone to all these schools. I went to the art school that so many of my favorite artists have gone to”, he approaches from above, not from below, or even from the recently popular “outside”. An artist is meant to come up through the ranks, be found in a graduate show or years later in some shitty white hole, to struggle, to fail over and over, basically to survive the filtration process by which we separate those that take this seriously from those that will ultimately do this in their spare time or not at all. We are suspicious of the privilege that allows him to shortcut this process.
We’re right to be suspicious. This is a small world with far fewer opportunities than there are extremely talented people. Most of us have got to make our own opportunities, and to pay for them out of the meager bank accounts supplied by our flexible-freelance-part-time-side-jobs. So, when we see someone showing at PACE, making work like the above, we’re bummed out.
But, by not taking James Franco seriously because he’s James Franco, we aren’t actually confronting the legitimacy/credibility/quality question at all. To think he makes boring art is a perfectly valid reaction, but to make him outcast from our little tribe for reasons of pedigree is a pretty slippery slope.
Read the interview, and think about the lines you draw in the sand. Because it is, after all, sand, and just like High School, it’s likely that in 20 years no one is going to remember who you or James Franco were. Maybe your sand drawing will still be in the volleyball pit though.
Spending a week at the Frieze Art Fair is a dangerous activity. The task is made easier with the presence of Frieze Masters as a secondary site located 15 minutes walk away. This provides the visitor with at least a glimpse at the sky, and the ability to check ones senses by distinguishing between the everyday paraphernalia of Regent's Park with the additions of the 'Sculpture Park'. Thus Frieze appropriates the long galleries of 17th century country houses, as well as Sicilian streets for the activity of simply strolling around. On this basis, one might go as far to consider the art fair as a compact version of a 21st century Grand Tour with the sad exception that London is far too affluent to ever be mistaken for the ruins of 18th century Rome.
Those who do spend a week at Frieze are paid to do so, although this monetary exchange is rarely considered in most left-wing critiques of the 'Art World' where the flows of capital exchanged for named artworks are under constant assault. To be paid to man a booth at Frieze is part of the role of working in an art gallery, and it will represent some of the year's most important trading opportunities. There are of course, another body of people who work 'behind the scenes', such as those selling coffee, waiting tables at the restaurants, or responsible for the erection and removal of the enormous tent in which the fair is housed. Their accounts of the fair are difficult to record, and will largely be excluded from any coverage, although it would be a good topic for a detailed investigation by one of our more august left-wing newspapers.
In any case, Frieze presents itself as a subject for measurement, symptomatic of the art world in general. As we are reminded of prices for each hammer blow in a Mayfair salesroom, and then told whether this is good or bad, we might turn to the late French historian Ferdinand Braudel, who stated that the Mediterranean Sea (c. 1560) was 99 days long. With this in mind, can we ever believe Frieze is just a week long? I wonder if the real challenge is for someone not associated with Frieze to spend the entire week there, and this provides an opportunity to consider a range of individuals for the role of 'Frieze Observer'. The first thing to do is to rule out most people living in London, or who have a sustained interest in art, for their views are already well serviced. This article will present some candidates for the role.
In her study “On the Appeal and Distrust of Objects in the North-West Atlantic”, anthropologist Jill Ridley argues when everyday objects are removed from a domestic setting, the longing of their owners often recedes within a short period. Having spent two years living on the Shetland Island and in rural Oxfordshire, Ridley surreptitiously collected a large number of insignificant items from local homes, ranging from toothbrushes, china ornaments, and tablespoons. When she later attempted to return the objects, she often met with either ignorance or hostility from the former owners. She calls this phenomenon 'artefiction' and it would be useful to apply this to some of the Frieze exhibitors, such as those with Netsuke carvings or just very small drawings.
The 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi is based on the Uto-Aztecan Hopi language, and translates as Life Out of Balance, which could be a useful title for Frieze, or any kind of alienating phenomena in the early 21st century. The film consists of a series of long shots of various scenes in the United States such as Arizona canyons, NASA spacecraft launches, and the streets of New York City, accompanied by a minimal classical soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. One of my own failed submissions to the Frieze project space was a video which borrowed quite heavily from Koyaanisqatsi, with my own video footage of the event combined with some anonymous synthesiser tracks which I found on a French website. Making the video four times slower turns what is labelled 'Frieze Week' into 'Frieze Month'. With spectators now spending four times looking at each artwork, the Fair is transformed from contemporary tent to medieval cathedral. Many of the 'normal' elements of the fair, such as the pouring of a hot drink, when slowed down, become some kind of elaborate ritual. Having spent too much of my life already in dark spaces in public art galleries, it seems unfair to inflict this content on anyone further than the yet-to-be-established Whyte Square YouTube channel.
On the second visit to Frieze Masters
On my second visit to Frieze Masters, I passed by the Colnaghi stand, the gallery famous for their patronage of the great forger Eric Hebborn. Perhaps it is unkind to label Hebborn merely as a forger, such was his technical mastery. But his imagination was firmly stuck in the past, and I feel he would have been more at home in Frieze Masters rather than trying to deal with the concerns of contemporary art. Hebborn is another inspiration for me, with my other rejected Frieze project being to create a third tent which contains only copies of artworks. The problem of quickly creating so much new work could be resolved by the pro bono utilization of Damien Hirst's large team of artworkers, although my unintentional reference to the ubiquitous musician seems somewhat lost in the earnest echelons of the artworld.
There is no need to imagine what would happen if author and artist Douglas Coupland ended up at Frieze, as he gave a talk. In his 1993 work Microserfs he gives us a delighfully wry insight into the nerd-world of Microsoft, making the release of the next version of the Microsoft Office seem as compelling as a spy thriller. I hope he is already writing a serialisation of Frieze, which I feel would work better as a TV show, for writing about visual things can often be a thankless task. It is no irony that Frieze is an art fair based on a magazine founded in 1991.
Another publishing irony is the presence in British newsagents of a vast array of magazines dedicated to information technology, both on hardware (computers, mobile phones and their variants) as well as ways of negotiating the internet, apps and other software-based content. In the 1990s, these magazines, often up to 300 pages long, served as the geeky younger brother of titles such as Vogue, and as catalogues before the Internet destroyed the need to flick through eighteen pages of different types of hard drive. The great exception was Wired magazine, founded in 1993, which focused on the culture which emerged around the growth of the internet, although sadly this offbeat approach was gone by the year 2000 when the publisher made it a mainstream technology magazine.
I wonder what aspects of Frieze travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux would complain about – for if there is any type of person suited to the week-long marathon, it surely must be someone accustomed to uncomfortable journeys and spending time in strange locations. In The Old Patagonian Express, he realises that railways are not quite the efficient modern transport as found in Europe, but certainly in Guatemala (and other places), the mode of transport of last resort. In hindsight, bringing Theroux could be rather problematic as I suspect he might ask too many questions. I feel he would be found at the secret bar of the Museum of Everything, chatting up the bar staff, downing cocktails and imagining himself far far away from Regent's Park.
I am working again in the spirit of Hebborn when I mentioned Jill Ridley above, for it was actually the occasional writer Lena Harrison who gave me the reference. I was not surprised to see her at Frieze (she is an irregular on the private view circuit) and was photographing the skirting board of the Stephen Friedman stall. She said it was the only one she had spotted which had no power sockets, and thus was exceptional. We discussed briefly the power requirements of the fair, dominated by the lighting, then the coffee machines, and the charging of Apple devices. I asked her if she would like a souvenir of a genuine power socket from Frieze and she said yes, but sadly I was not able to acquire one.
Navigation around Frieze is aided by a paper map, and this I feel, is the most obvious suggestion that one is in a trade fair, rather than an artistic installation. By presenting each gallery (and project space) in a neat grid, provides the visitor with a means of not wasting time in wandering needlessly around the fair. One can also take part in a guided tour of Frieze, and thus have someone else's opinions of what is worth looking at inflicted upon oneself. Tourism by guidebook, by ticking off sights, by wandering the streets looking at a glass screen, has changed the way we see the world. The Taj Mahal has become a different place through the picture postcard, and it is difficult to spend time just looking at things. Even if we do persist in devoting thirty minutes to a painting or building, does that time mean we will end up being seduced by the time we have spent? One of the problems at Frieze is the monotony of the rectangular booths means the viewer can be seduced easily by the prospect of a croissant at Gail's Bakery or just by an artwork which knowingly breaks the rules of the fair.
On the third visit to Frieze
By the time I had returned to Frieze, there were not even the marks of the temporary supports which had held the giant marquee together. The thousands of empty coffee cups and complimentary copies of the Financial Times had, I hoped been ground together into pulp to create several copies of the Daily Express whose opinions would never be read by the masters of Frieze. What is boring about Frieze is perhaps its limited view of the world, and that of the art world. Accepting what is presented at any art gallery or fair, is to willing agree to the lunacies of other peoples' opinions.
As I wandered around Regent's Park, I knew in different versions of the present, it would not be named after the Prince Regent, that George III would not have suffered from bouts of insanity, that John Soane would have taken the place of architect John Nash, and that I would be standing in the grounds of a royal palace, drinking a cup of coffee after having viewed the British National Collection (formerly the Royal Collection) of oil paintings and drawings. The Frieze Art Fair would have just closed in Paris, and would shortly be moving onto Munich, where it was founded and has been held every year in the Bavarian Hofgarden.
London’s art museums have come up with another wonderful set of responses to the aesthetic questions of today. In ‘Painting the Modern Garden’, an exhibition shared between the Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, they have made a shot at a comprehensive survey of the subject of plants and, perhaps just as importantly, what is under plants.
In Room One, a video called Parallels by artist Harun Farocki shows how in the past artists found representing plants and the space under them very difficult. A cold, authoritative lady’s voice relays the fact that, until recently, trees, bushes and grass had to be represented by small moving squares. These squares were not all green, but many of them were. There was no underneath; perhaps the artists had not yet conceptualised this aspect.
On the other side of the room, another video in the same series explores more recent developments in the field. In this period, men with guns could walk around a complex but circumscribed world of vegetation. Grass waved in the wind due to complex computer modelling. Sometimes bushes were quite hollow, as if plant-ness simply floated on the surface of things. Sometimes, even more recently, the fronds of tropical ferns would actually move out of the way as you swung your machete about. However, when it came to the question of what lay underneath all of this, it turned out that the world of plants was a thin shell of changing complex forms, under which lay the ocean or the void. This is illustrated above.
Over at the Royal Academy, the continuation of the show was packed with excited people of various ages. There we were permitted to see the solution to the problems posed in the previous works. In a large series of works called ‘Water Lilies’, the thin shell of plant life existing over a great void was finally resolved into matter. What had previously been void became highly complex, shimmering, and somewhere between solid, liquid and gas. Here at last the answer to the question of what goes on under plants. Longstanding problems about boundaries and repetition seemed finally solved. The crowd was heaving with all ages and classes. An American lady gave out a sharp yelp of pleasure.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, following the success of its ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition, which collected often ephemeral items created for use in left wing and minority protest around the globe, have instigated a new strand of ‘rapid response collecting’. Objects are and will be collected according to their importance to major moments in contemporary politics, as well as in contemporary design and technological change. The first results of this shift in priorities are on show now in a series of galleries called ‘Europe’, funded in part by the ruling Al Thani family of Qatar.
One of the dangers of contemporary art is to be given a lesson in the types of art the artist feels you should know. While Ai Weiwei’s show at the Royal Academy does this at times, he wears his influences lightly, weaving them together with a myriad of political and historical concerns to produce a compelling exhibition.
There is great variety here, not just in the multicoloured donations of Lego bricks through the sunroof of an elderly BMW parked in the RA courtyard, but in the repositioned furniture, the glass cases of ‘antiques’, the surveillance wallpaper and the claustrophobic box installations in which we view Ai under arrest in 2011.
Unlike many artists, Ai is able to fuse his role as a political activist with a consistently engaging use of materials which means the viewer rarely feels lectured to, and instead is left with an desire to further explore Chinese history and culture.
The short lived Rendezvous of the Rocky Mountain fur trade lived and died with the popularity of the Beaver skin hat in the 19th century, but while it lasted it functioned as a yearly marketplace where fur trappers sold the rewards of their past year’s work and bought supplies for the next. It was an event attended by both natives and solitary ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ men who would tolerate each other for the mutual benefit of all. It was a temporary space, no permanent settlement could sustain itself with these short bursts of trade. Frieze Art Fair houses itself in Regent’s Park in London for one week a year. Neither the galleries within, nor the fair itself could sustain this kind of event on a year round basis. The geography would be too dense, and the competition to fierce. We can imagine an science fiction novel about the inhabitants of Frieze being sealed within the fair as a nuclear winter rages outside. Art is burnt for warmth and Gail’s Bakery sandwiches become items of extreme value. The tents of Frieze and the Rendezvous do not simply keep the rain out, their temporary nature also allows an institution to repeat itself year after year by insulating it from the economic systems which would tear it apart if it dared to remain too long in one place.
The fair is in fact two fairs, which take place in separate tents. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll refer to them as Frieze Contemporary and Frieze Masters. These two trade fairs offer investments of very different natures, and the interiors of their respective tents reflect these differences.
Frieze Contemporary takes place in the larger of the two tents. Within it are a multitude of galleries, each has its own cardboard sign and a booth with a loose and permeable border. Not simply a modern blankness, the white walls seem to want to disappear and one gets the feeling that if they were deprived of objects, they would. Whiteness becomes a mirage filled desert the denizens of which camouflage themselves in black. The booths form a vast network of white canyons, howling with the ever-shifting winds of market variability and price fluctuations. The booths have no roofs for the prices to go through, the only limit is the distant fabric of the tent itself. Investing in this environment could be risky and the spatial slipperiness of the tent reminds us that it is not for the faint of heart.
Housed within the smaller tent (still of awesome size), is Frieze Masters. Painted in a variety of earthy grays, the booths here are of a more substantial, permanent appearance. They are separate and discrete. They enclose and protect the artwork from the winds of fashion. There doesn’t seem to be any wind at all, it’s almost airless. There is something safe about these booths, a cozy, stuffy feeling, the sort that drives teenagers to sneak out of their bedroom window, smoke cigarettes and drive their cars too fast. Things here are a safe bet, blue-chip, they are not going to go down in value very much, nor are they going to go up, the ceiling on each gallery prevents that.
Vitrines within the fair further stabilize the market value of their contents, freezing the value of illuminated manuscripts with a museum-like detachment.
Down by Baker Street tube station, beneath Westminster University in the extremely temporary hire-space of Ambika P3 is the the Sunday Art Fair. The proximity to the university reflects the duality of the both hyper-nurturing and cold factory output of the modern academic system as well as the socioeconomic habitats of the ‘emerging’ artist. Within what is still a trade fair, are objects of extremely volatile value. There are no walls except for the cladding of pre-existing fabric of the building. The space is not that dissimilar to the exterior bay of a container ship, and even contains a gantry crane, suggesting that this market and the works within it are entirely open to the elements and are being tested for their ability to withstand exposure.
Good to be back in Venice! Love this piece by Michael Landy, he is disposing of his entire personal art collection via the Venitian municiple waste removal service on the occasion of the 2015 Venice Bienalle.
Few people remember what happens at music festivals - even the more ‘secret’ elements which are often advertised only by word-of-mouth. Last summer, many people queued up to see Marina Abramovic at the Serpentine Gallery. With the reassurance of a friend (who incidentally reviewed the show here) that Abramovic would be in Hyde Park all summer, I went to a number of festivals outside London, as I must admit I am not a huge fan of her work.
On the final day of one festival (perhaps the largest and most famous in the UK), I was a little tired of the atmosphere of ‘anything goes’ - a rather brazen attempt to make everything interesting to the middle-class attendees. I don’t remember seeing bands such as Metallica, Jagwar Ma or Metronomy which I had looked forward to - but my friend Cressida said it had been a fairly average year. As we sat down to breakfast in a more civilized part of the site, only after several bacon sandwiches did I notice a middle-aged woman with dark hair at the end of the table, looking intently at everyone eating. I felt it more amusing than disconcerting yet Cressida gave me a small nudge as if to tell me off. But having suppressed the urge to snigger, I found myself returning her stare, and looking back at a face which seemed intimidating but also entrancing.
The current exhibition at the Barbican The Artist as Collector provides the viewer with a series of objects accumulated by artists, with a broad variety of artefacts. Ever since the Renaissance, collecting and art have been cosy bedfellows, with the aristocratic accumulation of oil painting being the basis of many of today's finest public collections. To collect is to obsess, and artists are themselves some of the great obsessives of today.
Ai Weiwei's recent installation at the Tower of London, with its poignant references to the Opium Wars, contemporary human rights abuses by the Chinese state, and the color of the China's flag has drawn criticism from some reviewers for being too literal, but has still drawn millions of visitors over the past month, leading many to ask for the exhibition to be extended.
WS is always keen on a pun, however dangerous the waters this may get us into. And thus we find ourselves at Rave the Painforest, the latest show from Nate Lowman.
The show is (for good or bad) lacking in the smiley faces which Lowman has previously appropriated ad infinitum, yet it seemed a little underwhelming compared to his previous work. That said, WS is often a little bored with the endless cycles of Warholia (to coin a noun) and this foray into a more ambiguous form of painting is partly intriguing.
Whether this move to Kurt Schwitters Strasse is a permanent thing remains unclear, for this is the same Nate Lowman who has designed Converse trainers (in limited edition obviously) and it may be hard for him to forsake the American dream which he is both part of and riffing off.
Here at WS, we are big fans of ruins, and the many forms they take, from Pompeii to the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ruins are fascinating because they invite us to speculate on how everything in the end will turn to dust, or at least pretty versions of it.
The Ruin Lust show was less a detailed study of this phenomenon than an illustration of it, with works mainly from the Tate's collection. Throughout the show, (in which WS enjoyed the photographs of Jane and Louise Wilson, and Joseph's Gandy's views of the Bank of England), we kept hoping there might be a painting by Anselm Kiefer or perhaps a photo of Detroit, but this was not to be.
Ultimately, ruins are more fun to explore than to look at pictures of; and any art which addresses the subject of ruins must deal with this problem. Thus this exhibition had WS yearning to revisit Angkor Wat, or perhaps the city of Merv in Turkmenistan, rather than delving into the Tate's vaults.
Camille Henrot’s show at Chisenhale has a blue carpet, it also has blue walls. Having left the Pantone book in the other jacket, it was impossible to verify whether or not it was International Klein Blue. Even lacking this litmus test, WS was convinced that what we saw was in fact Art.
The blueness of the room tied each of the potentially disparate elements into more of a single piece than an immersive environment. WS was not lost in a new world, instead we wandered through a diagrammatic sculpture, the ocean of blue allowing us float through the room without the harsh interruption of matt emulsion.
Pursued by an animatronic snake, the sound of it’s silly toy motor softened by ambient music, scanning slowly through the vast accumulation of items became a pleasure akin to that of a lazy morning spent scrolling through endless pages on Ebay (which makes an occasional cameo appearance).
Go check The Pale Fox out thru April 13 chisenhale.org.uk
While in the neighborhood, check out the Benedict Drew show at Matt’s Gallery , see our review here
Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer at Hauser & Wirth (Savile Row, London)
After a while, one forgets about lots of the details of art exhibitions, and just remembers a few things. At the Dieter Roth/Arnulf Rainer show, WS encountered one of the most ubiquitous elements of the artworld - the black rectangular TV sets which don’t appear anywhere else, not now, or even in the 1990s. They are sturdy, stackable and certainly have more oomph than flatscreens or projected images. Even now WS can remember shows with these TVs, but with no memory of that which they displayed.
The work itself, sometimes messy, recycled or childlike, seemed a little divorced from the more authoritative white cube. It looked fresh from the studio, the product of perhaps many late night sessions, the witching hour transformed into 20th century hieroglyphs. While Roth’s food-based work may have been appropriate for an apocalyptic dinner party, these works are strictly for consumption after eating, accompanied by a glass of liqueur, or even the bottles of Becks that WS enjoyed.
Some further information
Number of people in formal attire: 60%
Number of people with bow-ties: 2
Drinks on offer: Becks (330ml)
Number of ubiquitous TV sets: 5
